The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,81
successful organism, so many effective designs, that the drunkard’s walk of evolution keeps finding them, even though they are sparsely embedded in the vast majority of failures.
In particular, we think that intelligent design focuses too narrowly on the evolution of specific structures found today, such as the precise molecular configuration of haemoglobin or the bacterial motor. In retrospect, these structures seem highly improbable; if nature were to aim for them again, it would almost certainly miss. But evolution selected these structures when it encountered them. What matters is how likely it is that evolution could find some such structure, not that specific one. If there are many suitable structures, then a process that automatically homes in on anything that seems to be an improvement has a good chance of finding one of them.
Think how improbable you are. If two genomes had not combined just so, if that egg and that sperm had not come together, if your father hadn’t met your mother at the dance, if the wartime bomb in the harbour had hit your grandfather instead of being a hundred metres away, if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo, or if victory had gone the other way in the American War of Independence, if the nascent Earth had not acquired an ocean, or the ripples in the Big Bang had been slightly different … you wouldn’t be here.
The odds that you exist are infinitesimal.
No. The odds that you exist are certain, because you do.
The processes that led to you are robust, and at each stage would have led to something similar, albeit different, if run again. No complex process ever produces the same result twice. But if it produces a similar result instead, that makes its consequences certain, not utterly unlikely. Only fine details will be different, second time around. The lottery of life is quite different when seen through the eyes of the eventual winners, rather than those of a random competitor before the contest has happened.
It’s tempting to assume that the evolution of technology can tell us about organic evolution, or vice versa, but these processes lead to apparent design in very different ways. However, there is a grand overall similarity in how we think about both systems, particularly how our thinking has changed over the last few years. The appearance of design is the most dramatic element in both systems. Although its provenance is different in the two cases, we are no longer surprised by it. We have realised that the universe is not doomed by increasing entropy to an eventual ‘heat death’, a traditional but somewhat misleading term which actually means that the universe will end up as a structureless lukewarm soup. Instead, the universe ‘makes it up as it goes along’, and what it makes up are designs. In that sense, at least, the appearance of new design in both technical and organic systems can be considered comparable. But it’s important not to stretch the metaphor too far.
Cultures can also be seen as evolving. In many ways, cultural evolution sits between organic and technological evolution. Advanced human societies make their members different and varied. All societies produce numerous distinct roles, from those limited by sex and age, such as childbearing or going to school, to those that seem to be chosen by the individual: warrior, accountant, thief. There is a division among sociologists that is comparable to that between Morris and Gould. Some believe that the roles are in some sense transcendent or universal; they look for proto-accountants in ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer societies. Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes, such as the persona, the shadow, and the self. In his view, these were extremely ancient common images derived from humanity’s collective subconscious, which affected how we interpret the world. Others, however, believe that some roles in different societies, even though they look similar and the names translate similarly, can be fundamentally different: a Japanese car worker has a different worldview from that of his English equivalent, and occupies a different societal slot.
Both sociological viewpoints can provide useful insights: different societies, like different ecologies and different cultures, provide diverse roles for their members. The cultural invention of generic occupations is comparable to the organic invention of things like chordates, trilobites, muscles and nests. It is also comparable to the technological inventions of – say – bicycles, the internal combustion engine, wheat and rope. Money in human societies is usefully analogous to the way cells produce and exchange energy, using the molecules ADP and ATP (adenosine